My parents preferred Dan Rather. Sometimes they would watch Tom Brokaw deliver the news and only rarely did they settle for Peter Jennings. After dinner each night, we would retire to the main room in the house to watch the evening news. At my father’s side was a mug of steaming jasmine tea. My mother usually had a cup of hot water. I sat between them. I easily tucked my lanky nine year-old legs underneath me.

Though my eyes were fixed on the images flashing from the large metal box (”Dan Rather has nice hair”), my mind was elsewhere. I could not understand why my parents insisted on watching the news every night. I assumed it was part of a digestion ritual: Tea and TV.

The commercials, however, captured my attention.

C&R Clothiers, for many years, ran an advertisement where the camera slowly revolved around headless men wearing tailored suits. These men, visible only from the neck down, had their hands on their slim hips, adjusting their paisley neckties, and within the pockets of their pleated pants. In the background, a woman (and not Dinah Washington, who, incidentally, sounds a bit like Ella Fitzgerald) crooned

What a difference a day makes… twenty-four little hours….

Soon, my father and I began to mimic the woman with maudlin falsetto voices. That was the only line we could ever recite, as that was the only line the woman ever sang in the commercial. After those twenty-four little hours, a masculine voice provided a voiceover about the quality clothing of C&R Clothiers and how you—yes, you!—could look as good as these men in twenty-four little hours.

Google tells me that C&R Clothiers went bankrupt in 1992.

Jamie Cullum covers “What a Difference a Day Makes” on his (fun) album Twentysomething. Within the first few bars of the song, I automatically think of slim men in tweed suits. The words “C&R Clothing” in script font appear in my mind and I remember those temperate days in Southern California, President Reagan’s toothy grin, and legwarmers.

This is the power of advertising.

Janssen has released a “new” antipsychotic medication called Invega (generic name paliperidone), which is the supposedly the “new and improved” version of Risperdal (generic name risperidone). Coincidentally, risperidone is about go off patent. (Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry has covered this issue nicely, as has Dr. Carlat.)

The advertisements (and website) for Invega features a young, black male. In some ads, he is looking up, eyes closed, against a background of hand-drawn, anguished faces. The caption reads: “Do You Choose a Powerful Antipsychotic for His Mind That Also Considers His Body?” In other ads, he smiles warmly at the camera. Or is carrying a bag of groceries alongside a young, white female, who is also carrying a bag of groceries.

As far as I know, this is the only advertisement for antipsychotic medication that features a non-white person.

I wonder how this will affect prescribing practices. Will physicians and psychiatrists preferentially (and perhaps unconsciously) prescribe Invega more often to black individuals than to white people? How does this advertisement affect the stereotypes psychiatrists may hold in their minds about who has psychotic disorders? Is there a marketing scheme behind this ploy? In other branches of medicine, researchers have conducted studies about medications that may be more efficacious in black individuals (the condition that jumps to mind is high blood pressure). Because no one totally knows how antipsychotics work (there are theories, but no one knows definitively, even if he pontificates otherwise), there is no evidence to use one antipsychotic over another in a specific ethnic population…

… unless prescribers somehow associate one medication with one population through advertising and, over time, interpret this as “evidence”.

The people who know the most about human behavior and how to influence it are not psychiatrists or psychologists. They’re marketers.